My Personal Wrap-Up of #SITMuc

Gregor Wolf, Martin Steinberg and Damir Majer did a great job and organized a terrific event which was broadcasted and will also be shown on Youtube. There was an CodeJam with topic ABAP on HANA the day before. Both events took part at an inspiring location. Impact Hub Munich is part of a global network and a place for social entrepreneurship and its motto is: “Enabling people to do go good.” It is an inspiring place and we had a “sexy salad” and prepared our lunch in a coworking and networking event. Later we had cake from a granny startup called Kuchentratsch: they make it possible that grannies come together to prepare cake for cafés and catering. At the end we tasted Quartiermeisterbier, a not-for-profit beer whose profit supports regional social and cultural projects. This place was optimal for networking and after each talk there was enough time for discussion, chatting with peers and learning about new business ideas. The slides of the talks will be published in the SCN wiki and so will the videos if the tasks. But nevertheless I would like to write a short blog about my expressions.

Paradigm Shift at SAP – Curse or Blessing?

Eric Westenberger gave an inspiring talk paradigm shifts at SAP. My first thoughts about this topic have been that every book about innovation names four groups of people that are stakeholders in an innovation process: protagonists, open minds, closed minds and antagonists are interacting with each other. I think it is good that people at SAP are thinking about the next big thing and I’m sure that we learn more about it at SAP TechEd && d-code.

I think in the last years there was a cultural change within the SAP Ecosystem and all players are protagonists of change or are at least open minded. And the whole ecosystem has experience with successful paradigm changes as well the ones that failed in the past like ESOA. IMHO the biggest challenges for future technologies are data privacy, digital identity and complexity of standards. We have to solve these challenges otherwise innovation can become a curse.

Coolcats don’t use Customizing

As you might already know one of my favorite topics in the last year was business rules management in ABAP so I decided to talk about it. I’m happy that my colleague Daniel Ridder found the time since he’s very skilled using that technology. He could show in a demo that every ABAP developer can use it successfully. The slides are already online.

The message of this talk was very simple:

Usually we use customizing to make standard software flexible and configurable. Unfortunately this approach is problematic since single customizing entries can’t be documented, there is no proper versioning concept and it is no clear how single entries work together and what side effects and change has. This becomes even worse since self developed customizing driven frameworks for automated calculations and decisions are very complex and slow.

So we encourage to use a strategic framework of SAP NetWeaver to achieve standardized, well documented rule sets that can be understood by business experts. This technology makes SAP Business Suite implementations more transparent and easier to change. So BRFplus and DSM will simplify SAP solutions with all its positive consequences like reduction TCO, TDC and lead to standardization.

Starting with BRFplus and DSM is very simple and compared to customizing you have immediate success since there is versioning, simulation, extensibility and much more. The crucial point is that BRFplus and DSM offer the chance that IT and business can work hand in hand but therefore you’ll often need a cultural change since both groups usually don’t talk to each other and prefer heavy-weight processes that are expensive and error-prone.

Agile Pair Programming with ADT

Aspect of culture and communication have been a common red thread of all lectures so far – without them innovation won’t get the necessary momentum. And I take this as learned lesson from the pair programming session of Damir Majer and Martin Steinberg. While performing a code kata they discussed programming paradigms, ABAP idioms, features of ABAP in Eclipse and agile code development. And this is what I learned from this talk: programming is craftsmanship and we should start to talk about what we are doing and work together instead of isolate developers and prevent them to discuss what they are doing.

SAP Fiori-like Apps on SAP HANA Cloud Platform

The talk by Bertram Ganz was surprising: SAP River RDE (former SAP River IDE) is now SAP Web IDE. Usually I hate renaming and rebranding but here it makes perfectly sense: companies can extend, develop and run Fiori apps using a graphical tool in the cloud. Also they can connect those apps through their backend systems using SAP Cloud Connector – a bidirectional VPN channel.

This is a perfect use case for the cloud: you don’t have to install a SAP Web IDE server together with its sophisticated git components and use the SAP offering.

You also don’t need to expose your company network to the internet since the HANA Cloud Platform is the entry point. This makes perfect sense for most customers and also developers can test it using a trial license. As SAP Partner I have some questions and I was lucky I could address them to Bertram later in a discussion.

Sneak Peak: ADT, REST with and without HTTP and Third Wave Coffee

The session of Thomas Ritter was really surprising. It was about a simple functionality (see OSS note 2046730 – How to access ADT REST Resources via HTTP). Thomas explained what we can do with it and the session turned into a very inspiring about talk about REST and how a simple architecture can lead to really cool use cases. Then Thomas came to his favorite topic: third wave coffee from Mahlefitz. And he presented us two completely different styles of coffee – one smelled like caramel and the other one like read fruit – but you had to drink it when it was cold. This talk and the tasting was most inspiring because it showed that even a coffee addict like me is still able to learn new aspects about a drink that it I thought to be very familira with.

ATC, ADMP and Cloud Sensors

I liked the talk by Alessando Lavazzi about the ABAP Test Cockpit. I’m already using the Code Inspector but he convinced me to switch to ATC. Jasmin Gruschke explained ABAP Managed Database Procedures and explained the difference to ABAP Core Data Services which are database agnostic and should be used if you want to achieve a database agnostic code line.The talk Mark Teichmann about HANA Cloud and sensors was a surprise and I liked the showed the JavaScript code. And yes, this language becomes more and more important for SAP developers.

Networking

The most valuable part was networking and chatting with other experts. My trending topics have been ABAP in Eclipse, test driven development, RESTful architectures, their challenges and UI5 development.

Summary

The organization team and all speakers proved that SAP Inside Track is a perfect opportunity for SAP professionals to extend their business network, learn about new technology and discuss their ideas. As Eric Westenberger explained in his talk, paradigm shifts require that we switch the view point. I learned that other professional sometimes work completely different and so I am currently rethinking my personal opinions about REST, Cloud, coffee and other things. And I am very sure the Impact Hub Munich and its team contributed to my change of mind. So I thank all attendees for inspiring discussions and especially everyone who offered a session. And last but not least I thank the orga team and all sponsors for making the event possible.

4 Comments

Thanks for sharing your personal Wrap-up. It was for sure a great SIT. The agenda was very interesting, it will be nice to have the videos available. I am starting to play a bit with ABAP in Eclipse and currently enrolled for the openSAP course ABAP Development for SAP HANA, so I thought it was very nice that you had Jasmin there 🙂 .

Yes, Jasmin was there and I really liked her talk as well as her witty comments and answers. And yes, her talk as well her information proved that you are not able to develop state-of-the-art ABAP applications without ABAP in Eclipse. Even development of CSD views running on anyDB is not possible. This was a very important message of CodeJam and #SITMuc .

Thanks to share a summary of SIT. It’s amazing how old dogs can learn new tricks 😛

All the thems are very interesting, but BRFplus really calls my attention. It’s very good to chalange the big paradigm about customizing (customizing is always better them custom developments). It’s a theme that I’ll do some reasearch.

We are already in 2014 and still there are managers thinking programming is some magic that transform functional specification into applications. Just add coffee. I trully believe that programming is craftmanship (and it’s almost every developer agree), but work together (pair programming) does not count with the agreenment of all developers.

yes, BRFplus is very interesting and it is easy to start with since there is a great space on SCN about it. Moreover Carsten Ziegler does a great job and he and his team do a damn job and publish many whitepapers about BRFplus and DSM – so it is very likely that every question you have is already answered.

For me it is interesting that you can use this technique at every scale to achieve a more transparent an configurable BAdI implementation but you can also use for complex calculations using decision tables consisting 1000s of entries. Moreover the framework is completely open and you can extend it and use the API to automate tasks. I learned this framework since I had to check scanned accident reports and this is completely different then working with standardized business objects since those reports tell stories about the real life and happened to unlucky people.

And maybe this is the most important message from #SITMuc: we are good at implementing standardized processes but now we have to pay more attention to the real world and processes there to be better than our competitors. The talk about sensors and cloud was a great example – so far our Business Suite systems contain only flat and “one-dimensional” representation of real-world objects. The same holds for very interesting data source like scanned accident reports I mentioned above or new data sources from the internet like social media data. And yes, sometimes we need new paradigms and sometimes our existing technology like BRFplus can help us make the difference.

So the example of 3d wave coffee tasting showed me that even coffee, which is well-known to me, is much more complex than I thought and you can get new and surprising effects when you rethink the production and preparation processes. And this is also what I learned from the interesting concepts of startup I learned to know at HUB Munich.